Page 159 of In Somnis

Lennon

The inn’s kitchen is never fully quiet, even at this hour. The refrigerator unit hums, the old pipes knock somewhere behind the walls, and the fan above the stove ticks as it cools.

The counter is already clean, but I wipe it down again anyway, because the motion gives me something to do with my hands that isn’t thinking, and thinking is the one thing I absolutely cannot afford right now.

My head is doing that thing where it aches behind my eyes and at the base of my skull simultaneously, which means I’m either getting sick or I’ve been clenching my jaw for fourteen hours, and I know which one it is.

Jasper showed up an hour ago to help with dinner service, which in practice meant stealing bread, critiquing my music choices, and narrating his entire day at a volume that suggested he’d been saving it up. He never asked if anything was wrong. He just stayed, and somewhere between the last table clearing out and the mop going back in the closet, he hopped up on the counter across from me, pulled out his tarot deck, and started shuffling with the purposefulness of someone who has decided they’re going to help whether you’ve asked for it or not.

I haven’t asked for it. I also haven’t told him to leave, which probably says something.

Mostly, I’m too tired to pretend I don’t want company.

“You don’t have to do that,” I tell him.

“The universe wants to help you.” He doesn’t look up. “Who am I to stand in the way?”

“The universe should mind its business.”

He looks up at that, briefly, with those knowing blue eyes that have no business being that perceptive. “You’ve wiped that same section of counter four times.”

I look down at my hand. At the cloth. At the counter.

“It’s a stubborn spot.”

He chuckles and goes back to shuffling.

I try to remember what I’m supposed to be feeling right now. Tired. That’s the main one. Tired, and my skull is three sizes too small for everything happening inside it. Also, as if I’ve done something irreversible and possibly several somethings, and I can’t quite figure out which one to be most alarmed by.

Paul.

Ridge.

And—and this is the part I’m not examining—Nevan, who was in my dream in a context I am aggressively not thinking about, even though it wasn’t real, even though I was asleep, even though dream logic is not the same as waking logic, and nobody holds you accountable for your subconscious. That’s literally the whole premise.

I wipe down the counter a sixth time.

At this point, I’m basically polishing my own denial.

“Okay.” Jasper holds the deck in one hand and knocks on it with the other, eyes squeezed shut. “What do you need, what do you need, what do you…”

A card slips free and flutters down on the counter.

He cracks open one eye, looks at it, and snorts. “Oh. Wow. Yeah.”

“What?”

He scoops it up and holds it out to me. The Ace of Wands. One very obvious wand, held aloft by a hand emerging from a cloud.

“You need dick.” Jasper grins.

I stare at him and think about Paul’s hands on my thighs on his white couch. About Ridge’s voice in my dream, saying, “greedy girl” as if he meant it sweetly. I think about Nevan in the same dream, which I am not thinking about.

“Creative energy,” Jasper continues cheerfully. “Passion. Life force. New beginnings.” He grins hard enough that both dimples appear at once. “But also, yeah. Dick.”

“I’m not discussing dicks with a teenager.”

“Interesting that you made it plural,” he notes immediately.